


I, at least, was tired.

by niisticks



Category: DCU
Genre: Angst, Batfic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 05:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2416055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niisticks/pseuds/niisticks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes he reads to Tim, imagines him waking up and reciting the book word for word along with Jason, a duet of Walter Scott or Anna Sewell, Jason slowly thumbing through the pages of the leather bounds Tim keeps on a shelf up high. He imagines rolling his eyes as Tim talks over him, inky, raven hair spilling across the pillow, bright blue eyes focusing far off on the memory of reading those pages once, twice, thirteen times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I, at least, was tired.

Jason is always a little shaken at how the world keeps going, no matter how around him things seem to have halted completely. Time has trapped him in a bubble where he just about draws breath, but is watching the lights trail across Gotham bridge, is sure that there are trains beneath the pavements carrying people to and fro in the city that never sleeps nor relents.

Gothamites move onwards, a mugging in an alley that stinks of piss, tall glasses of champagne raised in toast in the home of a socialite. He should be there, in all of those places. The Red Hood should have scared the criminally coward inside, Jason Todd should have at least pretended he wanted to be at Bruce's side, Dick's hand on his shoulder, and yet in all of Gotham, in all the places he should have been he was here.

A grey sky, a white room, a young man and his... What? Enemy, or maybe comrade on a good day, a brother even? Jason sighed hard through his nose, toeing his boots off by the door and striding to the window to close the curtains on Gotham, because all he needed to be right now was here.

"Hey, Pretender."

Sometimes he reads to Tim, imagines him waking up and reciting the book word for word along with Jason, a duet of Walter Scott or Anna Sewell, Jason slowly thumbing through the pages of the leather bounds Tim keeps on a shelf up high. He imagines rolling his eyes as Tim talks over him, inky, raven hair spilling across the pillow, bright blue eyes focusing far off on the memory of reading those pages once, twice, thirteen times. He had asked once when he had been about the manor, Jason had come across Tim in the parlor, sprawled on the window seat and immersed in the pages of his tattered books. 'Well loved', Tim had defended, palm flat on the cover.

Jason regarded the books on Tim's bedside, piled where he had left them from his last visit. It was late and he was worn out from a brutal patrol, he dropped himself haphazardly into the plush armchair between Tim and the window, his knees hooked on the arm and head propped in his hand. Anything he read now he'd lose track, anyway.

"Master Jason," Alfred greeted from the doorway, a tray of tea and small triangular sandwiches balanced on his fingertips.

"Alf," he nodded in return, slinging his feet to the floor at the eyebrow the butler raised as he approached. "It's late, you know you didn't have to get me anything."

"I don't imagine you might have bothered yourself, Master Jason. I know that you boys would sooner work yourselves to death than to remember to do such things as eat."

Jason snorted, leaning back to allow the tray to be placed on the bedside besides the small stack of books. "Thank you," he murmured, watching the butler's back as he poured something sweet and herbal smelling into a mug. "How is he?"

Alfred turned, offering the mug and turning his gaze onto Tim, eyes crinkling in the corners. "I'm afraid there has been no change. Master Dick insists that there's more colour in his cheeks," he offers. Jason doesn't believe it for a moment. From the moment he entered the room he could see the dark bruising under his eyes and the shadows around his jaw and collar. He nods anyway, they'll humour Dick so long as he wishes, but he wonders if he's the only one that wishes Dick's optimism wasn't so blatantly blind as it is.  
Tim has been unconscious for three months now, Bruce's doctors have declared him comatose and long ago suggested that they have said their goodbyes. It could be any day now that he wakes up, but he may not, and Tim would not want to waste away a ghost in the Wayne manor, nothing but a small boy and a painful memory. Jason won't say goodbye until he knows it's over, he has no speech planned out because he never even really said hello in the first place.

For Bruce goodbye is holding Tim's hand in his, sitting silent, a guard and a father in the crack of each dawn. For Damian it is denial, it is pretending not to slip into Tim's room and tell him stories of patrol, to brag that the Ducatti is as well cared for as ever, that he is training hard. Sometimes he reads, Arabic filling the quiet dread of the room in the dark of night. For Dick goodbye is bringing him fresh flowers, quietly sitting at the edge of Tim's bed and fussing, running his fingers through Tim's hair and bringing Alfred Tim's favourite t-shirts. One, Jason recognises is Dick's old university tee. For Alfred it is love. The same as if Tim were awake and working away at his desk, hot towels and fresh sheets, an open window if Gotham is treating them especially well.

Jason blinks, watching Alfred adjust the IV drip and run his careful hand gently over the pillow at Tim's ear, loosely catching the ends of his hair. He thinks the butler had cut it recently. "Go to sleep, Alf, I'll be here." He sets the mug down on the tray, getting up to bid him a goodnight.

Before the butler left he turned to Jason, allowing a smile and touching his leather clad shoulder. "It is good to have you home, Master Jason." He is gone down the hall before Jason can swallow his pride.

"It's good to be home."

\---

When Jason is sure the house is quiet he often moves from the armchair to sit against the footboard of Tim's bed, just watching him. Sometimes Tim's eyes move under his eyelids, brief and barely there at all, sometimes Jason feels brave and moves to sit cross legged up the bed, taking a hand in his own like a child, unsure, nervous. Which is ridiculous, he's Jason Todd, the Red Hood, what business it is of his to be acting like a school girl?

But not then, that night he was against the footboard, just watching and glancing at the clock, aware that if he'd really meant to get up early to sort out his own apartment that he'd have left this room by now, at least have had the decency to pretend he'd slept in the armchair a little. He breathes out slowly, his knee resting against Tim's.

"Wake up, Alice dear. Why, what a long sleep you've had."

\---

Oh, I've had such a curious dream!

It was a curious dream, dear, certainly.

\---

Tim opens his eyes slowly. His limbs are numb and heavy all the same and he barely feels there at all. There's warmth at his legs, and with some effort on his sore eyes he notices someone at his feet, arms crossed and head dipped in slumber. He is... unsurprised, he feels. Something about Jason being there makes an awful lot of sense in his tired confusion. His neck creaks as he drops his head to the side, the spines of Black Beauty and Ivanhoe peaking above a decorated teacup on his table. He is too tired to figure as to why, but he knows somewhere that he left those books on the shelf where they belong, hidden discreetly behind a photo of his family and Dick at the circus, years ago.

There's a dull ache behind his eyes and his fingers twitch with the daze of the pain. Tim opened his mouth, taking a shuddering breath through dusty lungs and easing his head back against the pillow proper. At the edge of his vision is fog, black spots in front of him and a lightness in his chest that eases all the protests of his throat.

"We at last reached home and I, at least, was tired."

\---

Jason wakes in time to hear the first plunge of the flat line. He panics for a moment, jolts upright and grimaces at the pull in his spine, but as he catches up with the room his eyes fly to Tim, then to the monitor glowing dim at his side. That was it, Jason realises, the last night. He looks to Tim's clock, to the window at the pale pink and orange curling around the curtains at the edges. The final night was nothing special, he did not read or talk or even sit especially close and that, well, that doesn't feel fair. There was no sign, no impending doom or gut feeling, no terribly drab weather or final words spoken.

He feels cheated, which is a ridiculous thing to feel; sat at the feet of a dead man and he can't feel anything but petty anger.

Jason slides off the bed, turning the droning machine off before it wakes the rest of the family. He'll tell them, he doesn't want Dick to fling himself into CPR, doesn't want the quiet unbelief and mourning of the rest at the door, skirting at the side of Tim's bed, unsure. It's as he moves to remove the plastic oxygen mask from Tim's face that he falters because there had definitely been a shift to how he fell asleep seeing that face, placed delicately in the center of the pillow, chin tilted up and closed eyes cast straight at the ceiling but this, this is different to the past three months of waking to that face.

Tim's cheek is against the soft white cotton of his pillow, burrowed, almost, there's hair stuck to his eyelashes that are wet, a slither of blue beneath his thick lashes and curtained behind his hair. Tim had awoken, Jason dully concludes, his fist clenching and unclenching, hovering at the boy's shoulder and that--

That's got to be a joke.

Jason exhales a laugh, running his rough thumb under Tim's eyes, feeling a cool dampness there before he gets the sense to close them properly.

"Tenacious. Right until the very last breath."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this hasn't been beta-read, it's just something I wrote late to get out of my system. Hope you enjoyed it, I'll start posting more as I can.


End file.
